Champions of Climate Action

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AUTHOR

Deborah Hart

Deborah Hart is a Melbourne based ‘activist, writer, mother’. Born in Nigeria to Australian parents, she spent most of her early years in the USA where her father worked in the fossil fuel and nuclear energy industry.

For 16 years Deborah worked in development roles with leading Australian arts and culture organisations, as funding shortages were forcing what she considers to be important crucibles in a healthy modern democracy to act like businesses, by forming close alliances with industries. Feeling uneasy that fossil fuel corporations, and the legal and finance industries that serve them, were among the few sponsors standing in the Arts, Deborah left her profession (2006) in order to devote more time to climate activism and LIVE, a local climate group that she had earlier founded.

Deborah later co-founded CLIMARTE (2010), an independent not for profit body that brings the arts community together to tackle climate change. She volunteers with many not-for-profit environment groups and helped establish ClimActs (2013), with Dr Liz Conor, to combine spectacle, humour and direct action to draw attention to the climate issue.

Deborah wrote Guarding Eden to help show how and why highly destructive, polluting industries that built immense wealth and influence last century are now using their power recklessly to protect their profits at all costs, and what ordinary, effectively and democratically organised community members are doing in attempts to safeguard nature and humanity’s future.